


If only for a night- WHO CARES IT'S AFFECTION, FUCKING GIVE GIVE GIVE

by AuntyAgonee



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood colour reveals, But it's there, Caring for friend you hurt, Fear of friends, Hurting your friends, Identity confusion, M/M, Pale Smut, Sadstuck, not a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-23 13:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3770557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been unexpected at all. The way your moirallegiance was deteriorating, it was pretty fucking obvious to your friends and anyone who spared a passing glance that the diamond you and Gamzee shared was not long for this world. If you wanted to save it, first you would have to get a fucking pHD in archaeology from the always prestigious Fuck My Life University to excavate the ruins of your relationship from the great desert of Lost Causes, and to get the necessary equipment, you’d need a grant so big it’d blot out the green sun. Some bulges were going to have to be massaged to get you and Gamzee out of the sands of shittiness you found yourselves stranded in.</p>
<p>In which Karkat tries to calm Gamzee down and ends up spilling lots of his pretty, red blood for the first time in front of another troll.<br/>The way Gamzee deals with this is both terrifying and totally unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If only for a night- WHO CARES IT'S AFFECTION, FUCKING GIVE GIVE GIVE

**Author's Note:**

> My only regret about Homestuck is the fact that we never saw any on-screen development of Gamzee and Karkat's cracking diamond.  
> Other than that, none whatsoever. Hussie is a fiction god and we should treat him accordingly, with annual tribute of crops and a virgin.

The way your secret is revealed is really fucking unexpected.  
In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been unexpected at all. The way your moirallegiance was deteriorating, it was pretty fucking obvious to your friends and anyone who spared a passing glance that the diamond you and Gamzee shared was not long for this world. If you wanted to save it, first you would have to get a fucking pHD in archaeology from the always prestigious Fuck My Life University to excavate the ruins of your relationship from the great desert of Lost Causes, and to get the necessary equipment, you’d need a grant so big it’d blot out the green sun. Some bulges were going to have to be massaged to get you and Gamzee out of the sands of shittiness you found yourselves stranded in.  
You were all set to try. Instead of running from his blood-rage and letting Dave take care of your dirty work by conking your moirail on the back of the head with a stool or something similarly blunt and heavy, say, Dave’s own head, you were going to pap it out. It was going to be tender and beautiful and all that stuff. But of course, like everything in the short tunnel of unending misery, torment and surprise deaths that made up your life so far, your plan went awry.  
Gamzee lashed out. Caught your arm and tore you open. When Gamzee drew his hand back, he found cherry red blood staining his fingertips instead of the nice, puke-lime-green he was probably expecting.  
You bolted before he could get out so much as a ‘MOTHERFUCKER!’  
Even you are sorta in awe of how quickly you managed to get under this desk. Alright, so it’s not exactly the most original or effective of hiding spaces- if Gamzee comes into the room and bends slightly, he’s going to see you, huddled in the corner with one fist around the hilt of your sickle and the other stuffed in your mouth to muffle your curses. But it is on the other side of the meteor. You’re not even sure how you got here. The moment you saw your nasty blood spilling out of the cut in your traitorous, paper-thin skin, flight mode overrode your instinct to talk or play dumb or scream cusses at the top of your considerable range of vocal volumes, soil your jeans and weep gallons of traitorously red fluid. That last one is what you assumed you’d do the first time your mutation was discovered, as it inevitably would be.  
Of course you’d like to imagine that you’d be brave. Heroic. Rebellious in the face of powers so powerful and laws so ancient there was practically no way to shout ‘NO’ when they decreed you should be wiped from the face of the planet into a little red smudge, then quickly mopped up by an unfortunate janitor that didn’t get paid enough for this level of shit. Maybe by the time you were ousted as red blooded, you’d have at least one loyal quadrant-mate too dumb to realise you were a mutant who would stand beside you, fearless in the face of death and worse or just too stupid to realise that was what you had doomed them to.  
You were kinda counting on Gamzee to be that exceedingly stupid quadrant-mate, but oh no, he had to evolve from mildly sinister juggalo to a full-on murder clown.  
He’s been slipping for a long time.  
You didn’t notice he was slipping until he’d slipped over the cliff, found a secret nation of people as crazy as him, gone on a quest to reunite them with an ancient treasure and summarily become their beloved, if young and naïve, leader man thing. That’s how you think of it anyway. Now he’s got you dangling on the fucking tenterhooks every long fucking hour of every fucking interminable day. You don’t know if he’s coming or going, but you suspect he’s invented an entirely new direction, as he seems to be pulling away from you and reality even as he draws closer and closer.  
You so wish it hadn’t been him. Leaning your head back on the wall you’re pressed up against, you consider the patterns in the wood of the belly of the table, as if the whorls and grains contain the secrets to love and life.  
Gamzee started out so easy to love. Easy to hate too, and you found a balance between the two of them that suited you just fine. You loved him from almost the moment you set eyes on him in person. Those sweeps of sass-talk on Pesterchum was like one long crescendo to the fairy-tail culmination of meeting your first love, your last pale love.   
But these kinds of magical things only last until midnight, and the fairy godlusus has long since fucked off to her ‘drunken deities with reality-altering powers anonymous’ meeting.   
She’s left you with a moirail whose torn between wanting to pap you and wanting to kill everyone else you love, or harbour a mild affection for at least. The pumpkin is busted and its guts are rotting. The hoof-beasts are mice; eating, pooping, sheet-gnawing rodents with no concept of a gallop. The footmen are eating flies and sunning themselves on walls again, darting off in that creepy, rippling way they do.  
You’re a peasant with a crazy royal on a short leash and you need to figure out something now.  
Now.   
Fucking now, please, your pan, do something smart.  
Your arm stings like a bitch.  
Gamzee’s gotten behind on filing his claws down lately. In those random moments of lucidity that are becoming shorter every time, he looks at his hands in distaste and mentions something about makin’ his motherfuckin’ way ‘round ta seein’ ‘bout a spa day for these fuckers.   
He hasn’t got around to it yet. You kept thinking you would have to hold him down and file them for him, otherwise he’d poke himself in the pan when he tried to pick his nose.  
Now you’re debating whether you should try to kill Gamzee or let him kill you.  
Way at the back of your pan where you stuff things like the possibility of unaddressed red inclinations in Equius Zahhak’s general direction and wondering what was going through Crabdad’s mind while he died, there’s a piping voice telling you you could never kill Gamzee. You love him too much. He basically owns your pusher and he doesn’t know it because a younger, and impossibly, dumber Karkat decided that he didn’t need to know.   
But you really do love him too much. His smile used to be as close to the sun as you were ever going to get, in your eyes, bright and blinding. His raspy laugh used to be your favourite song- you can’t remember what it sounds like now, you haven’t heard the genuine, ‘hey something’s funny!’ laugh in so long. The smell of his hair and the glint of moonlight on his horns used to fill you up inside like not even the juiciest grubloaf could.  
And you want that back. You want his smile, his laugh. Him. You just want your sweet, pan-addled moirail back and you’re not going to give up on him when there’s even the slimmest chance of redemption. Real or imagined.  
So he’s probably going to kill you. You don’t know this guy very well. You’ve figured that the cruel gods spirited away your Gamzee a long time ago and installed in his place a high blood that breathed the hemospectrum and shat religious propaganda. This guy doesn’t care about a little bastard like you, especially now that he’s had your blood on his holy personage. He’s going to kill you for the slight and experiment with your off-spectrum blood as a new, innovative pigment.  
Hey you might even start an art movement with your freaky blood. That’s a nice thought.  
The only other thing you can think of is to run to Kanaya. Undoubtedly, she will keep you safe from Gamzee if Gamzee decides he needs to hear your bones crunching under his clubs. But you’re afraid to leave the room and you left your communicator charging in the living room, so there’s no chance of contacting back-up. Also, you’re of the opinion that is none of Kanaya’s fucking business what colour you bleed. You’ve spent your life protecting this secret and you’d rather die with it.  
It’s gonna be pretty fucking obvious what made poor old Karkitty scared to get quadrant-close to people when Gamzee redecorates the meteor with your blood and some thoughtfully placed limbs (please, please let your legs end up in Dave’s bed so his fear of disembodied cold feet climbing his back can come true), but it’s the fact that you did your best to keep it quiet that counts.  
Oh shit.  
Were those footsteps in the hall, or are your articular sponge clots playing some spite and fear-fuelled tricks on you?  
Nope.  
No tricks.  
“Karkat?”  
The only thing that stops you from uttering a battle cry and charging into the hall is the way he sounds.  
He sounds like himself. He sounds like himself the first time you got on a pile together- so nervous he was practically rattling.   
You want to answer him. Really, you do, but your whole sleeve is drenched in blood and the smell of iron is making you sick and he might just be tricking you and Gog you can’t look him in the face when he’s got those crazy, hungry eyes mounted in his head instead of the doe-eyed, simpering smiling eyes you know and love and want back more than anything.  
Please pass me, you think, go bend Dave over a table and pitch-fuck him, or pillage Roses’ allegedly secret stash of fermented grape juice or harass Kanaya I don’t fucking care just don’t make me look at you.  
He shuffles into the room.  
“I can smell you in here.”  
Your pusher freezes, defrosts and starts to hammer like you’re being kicked in the chest by a hoof-beast.  
He’s on the other side of the room, he can’t possibly see you from here. Can he? You pray with all your strength that the desk will suddenly transform into a fortress of ultimate defence and solitude, that your fairy godlusus will beat her demons in time to make it so.  
“Hey.”  
He kneels a respectable distance away from you- far enough that you won’t reach him with a swipe and he won’t be able to get at you unless he lunges like a fucking monster.  
You stare at him, not trusting yourself to speak.  
He rubs the back of his neck in that ashamed childish way, that ‘sorry Papa but I just broke your high-school trophies and soiled dead Mama’s wedding dress with my tears and snot can I have a cookie’ way that can still melt your pusher.  
Your pusher melts to a Karkat-coloured slurry and drips into your lungs, making your throat thick.  
Gamzee pushes a first-aid kit across the floor to you “If y’all’re coggin’ that it’s safe ta have myself near yerself, then I wouldn’t mind getting’ my nurse on.”  
You give him a long, measured stare.  
This isn’t happening. This isn’t Gamzee. He’s not even wearing the same clothes- he’s in a white T-shirt without a design and some ragged jeans that are cut off at the knees, an outfit you haven’t seen him wearing since he left the beach, which is since ever. His hair looks a little less unruly and his face is clean of paint.  
This isn’t happening.  
“What do you want?” it comes out a lot more forceful than you thought you could manage “Are you going to toy with me before you kill me, or what?”  
He bites his lip “I…I ain’t the killin’ type, when it comes to y’all…I know I got blood on my hands, pabe, but…but it ain’t gone be yer blood, motherfuckin’ ever, I promise y’all that.”  
‘Pabe’. Gog it’s been literal eons since you hear ‘pabe’.  
It’s a car-crash of an affectionate term, smashing together ‘baby’ and ‘pale’ for a result that sounds like slang for some kind of dangerous medical procedure.  
He called you that as a joke at first, but it became his official pet name somewhere down the line. He’d whisper it while you jammed, or exclaim it as he passed you in the hall and patted you on the butt by way of greeting.   
He’s calling you ‘pabe’ now, as if it’s the most common thing in the world for his former –possibly- still-current-no-one-is-certain-moirail to be huddled under a desk in fear of him, bleeding red.  
“I’m a mutant.” you say, just because you want the satisfaction of being the first to say it.  
Gamzee nods, smiling sadly “I can see that.”  
He scoots a little closer hopefully, but he doesn’t try to hurt you.  
“What do you want with a mutant?”  
He shrugs “Don’t know that I’m aimin’ for no specifics, ‘part from not wantin’ y’all ta bleed out.”  
“What kind of game is this?”  
He looks a little hurt “No game, pabe. Jus’…y’know. I ain’t fixin’ ta bleed y’all worse.”  
Is it possible the sight of cherry blood actually hit Gamzee so hard it jolted him from his sober rage-stupor into a more Gamzee-ish state of being where he’s painfully aware of what he’s done and what he’s going to do in the future, but he still wants to help you.  
Glaring at him, you turn your face to the wall and stretch your arm out, inviting him to gape.  
“I know it’s disgusting.”  
Gamzee doesn’t respond at first. Out of the corner of your eye, you can’t help but watch for his reaction. He seems amazed, or at least caught between amazed and revolted. It’s kind of flattering that he hasn’t thrown up a geyser of insults and propaganda and maybe some half-digested sopor or grubloaf.  
“It’s…it’s not somethin’ I’d be layin’ eyes on ev’ry day.” he admits “Can I see? Did I cut y’all deep?”  
The guilt in his words is unmistakable.   
And it’s activating a deep pool of pale-longing you thought had long-since frozen over. Without thinking about it, mostly so you don’t consider the fucking spectrum of wonderful reasons there are not to do what you’re about to do, you lean over and kiss him lightly, almost bitterly on the sharp line of his jaw. You feel a tremor go through his body before you pull away from him, aiming your gander nubs at the ground.  
Emboldened, Gamzee touches your injured forearm gently, rubbing away some of the blood “I kinda knew. I ain’t so pan-addled that I didn’t figure out y’all had some motivation fer bein’ hemo-anon, and it weren’t jus’ y’all bein’ all motherfuckin’ pissy at tradition.”  
You swallow, your throat painfully dry “Bet you guys chat about all the time, behind my back.”  
He scoots a little closer to you, shaking his head “Nah. Ain’t cool ta chat shit ‘bout a brother ‘hind my brother’s back.”  
You believe him.  
You let go of the sickle, trying not to make the movement so obvious. If this is what Gamzee is waiting for, then he’s going to kill you right now, but there’s just too much hope welling up to give up on Gamzee and run, as your survival instincts are demanding of you.   
Gamzee smiles at you and shows you his red-stained finger-tip “I kinda like this colour.”  
That’s it.  
You’re doomed.  
If Gamzee wants to kill you, all he has to do is reach out and take you by the throat, because there is no way in hell you’re going to be able to convince yourself to stand up and walk away from this.  
“So, are you gonna work your healing juju on me or let me die of blood loss?”  
“That’s gonna hafta come off.” he nods to your blood-soaked shirt.  
This is turning into a low budget pale-porn fast as fuck and it’s as contrived and ill-written as the most low-budget of budgets. How the hell did this happen? What even is happening? You knew Gamzee was having trouble keeping himself straight in his own pan, but this is Captor-esque in the speed and thoroughness of the change.  
You take the hem of your shirt with your good arm and try to peel it off on your own, but it becomes pretty clear very fast that you’re going to need Gamzee’s help. Wordlessly, Gamzee pulls your shirt over your head. You pull you good arm out of the sleeve. He rolls the shirt down your arm, peeling it away from your skin with his long fingers so it doesn’t scrape along your arm as it comes off.  
You can’t look at your own blood. The red has seeped through the fabric of your grey sweater. Dave would be bowled over by the sheer fucking irony if he had a cultural concept of mutation.  
You curse.  
“Sorry.”  
“No, not you. Strider.”  
Gamzee’s face immediately darkens into a glower, but it is not a dangerous one “What about the motherfucker?”  
“The irony, Gamzee. There is so much fucking irony.”  
He shakes his head “Sure Kat. Irony.”  
You can’t remember the last time he called you Kat either. You’re pretty sure you have forbidden the name of pain of having his bulge chopped off and served to the meteor as a delicious secret recipe. Hearing it again is like having cold water poured all over you, soaking you from head to foot.  
Gamzee puts the bloody shirt on the floor at your feet, so if anyone ends up coming into the room they’ll have to strain around Gamzee to see the colour of the blood. Thoughtful of him. Now, you’re pretty sure this isn’t a trap. Even sober Gamzee isn’t capable of this much fore-thought; he’d get far too impatient to spill blood and would have taken the golden opportunity when you dropped your sickle.  
The two of you stare at each other for a moment, unsure of how to progress. Eventually Gamzee cracks open the first aid kit and pulls out a cloth to wipe up the blood.  
“I’ll get rid ‘a this. I already cleaned up the puddle y’all left.”  
You can’t pretend you’re not touched “Oh yeah? Good thinking.”  
He shrugs, clearly pleased “I’m real sorry I cut ya.”  
“Meh, part of the territory.” you thump him in the chest playfully “That’s what I get for trying to stick my hand into a storm system to pap it better.”  
The guilt disfigures his face. It’s only there for a moment, but it mingles with grief and the guilt of a bunch of other murders. You can tell he’s not only seeing red blood on his hands right now- Nepeta’s and Equius’s and Kanaya’s. Hell, he might have even mixed it up so much in his head that he feels responsible for Tavros’s and Vriska’s deaths, although if he really were responsible for killing Vriska you’d have slapped him on the back and given him a cookie for his good work.  
It breaks the little bit of your pusher that is still intact. You wind an arm around his skinny waist (does he eat now, that you’re not pestering him to fill out his cheekbones and his skinny, scallop hips?) and tug him into a loose hug, careful of bumping your arm.  
“Get me back to my block in one piece,” you mutter “Get this arm bandaged up.”  
Gamzee nods mutely. He looks like a virgin-moirail on the receiving end of his first pap. Stretching out a long piece of gauze, Gamzee tears it off and wraps it quickly around your arm. The cut is not so deep that it would need stitches, but you’re going to have to put some disinfectant on it later. Right now, the priority is to get your ragged ass to your own block, where you can lock the door and hide the injury with a wealth of cosmetics and medical supplies you amassed over the sweeps.  
“Still hurts?”  
You grit your teeth “I’ll live. Alright, where the fuck am I?”  
Gamzee smiles sheepishly “Y’all ran from me like y’all had the souls ‘a the damned on yer tail, motherfucker. Yer on the third floor, yeah? C’mon, I’ll take you back.”  
Stuffing the wet shirt into the first-aid kit, Gamzee backs out from under the desk and holds the door open for you. He mutters the room number under his breath, making a mental note to come by later and clean up the blood-mess you’ve left. It’ll be one of those miracles he’s always harping on about if he clings to his senses long enough to pap you into a quivering heap of sleepiness, toss you into the slime, then get into the vents and come back here with the appropriate, non-human, non-sexual cleaning supplies.  
How did he even get to you? Did he follow you through the vents, or did he brave the halls, knowing Kanaya could be waiting around any corner with a chainsaw?  
You don’t even want to know.  
Gamzee handles you with a softness that has been impossible for him for close to a sweep. His hand is planted firmly in the small of your back, supporting and guiding you. As the pain washes over you again and again, your vision is blurred out by dizziness, so you have to rely on him entirely to lead you where you need to go. Not too long ago, you could have dealt with a little cut like this without blinking. You could have dealt with a shot through the stomach without much complaint.  
The meteor has changed you, and SBurb has broken you.  
It’s inside you now, burning under your skin like a fever you can never soothe, sapping every spare ounce of energy so you’ve never eaten enough or slept enough…or maybe that’s just Gamzee.  
“We’re here.”  
The door swings open. Gamzee puts you down on the human rest slab Rose had installed in here when you weren’t looking, justifying it by saying it would help to ration out the sopor (you sleep with a smear of it on your forehead now, and every morning you wake up from nightmares, thinking about how every drop of sopor you save can be put towards drugging Gamzee back into the sinisterly docile idiot you fell for) and closes the door, locking it.  
Again, your flight instincts want to protest. They want to call you out for literally locking yourself into a desperate situation because of you’re unstable sorta-ex’s flimsy whim, a sudden craving to mop up the blood he has split. The moment that goes, you’re that shabby princess again, trapped in a tiny block with a were-prince.  
“Alright, lemme see that wicked bad arm again, brother.”  
You flip onto your back and offer the offending appendage.  
Gamzee tends to it without a word. He’s clumsily careful, and his hand only slips a couple of times when he’s applying the disinfectant. When he’s done, you’re wrapped in a fresh bandage, thick enough so that the blood won’t seep through to the surface for a good while. A harsh vinegar smell hangs in the air, making your eyes water a little bit.  
“This is fine…” you bite your lip “I can just cover this up with my clothes no problem…thanks.”  
He nods “I’d better get my self up ta that block ta clean up what you gone and leaked.”  
You’re seized by a pathetic fear of losing him so suddenly, violently, that you’ve caught his arm and tugged him onto the rest slab beside you.  
“What the fuck?” he squeaks.  
“Sorry, sorry,” wow that was almost as bad as unsolicited papping right there, you really need to control yourself “I just…no one’s gonna go up there. No one’s got any business up there, right? I mean, what’s the fuck is there to do? You know Rose and Kan are in each other’s pants somewhere and Terezi’s hanging her scalemates in her block and Dave’s probably dressed up a pillow to look like the John human and he’s rapping to it all alone and lonely and shit. There’s no reason for you to leave yet, is there?”  
Gamzee has to catch his breath before he can get some words out “No, I s’pose there ain’t. What’re y’all…aimin’ fer, here? What’s the…”  
“You can go if you want. But I wouldn’t mind if you stayed.”  
This past sweep started out good, in spite of the troubles that had you grounded on this meteor and the conspicuous absence of seven trolls you still miss like crazy. A lot of nights, you fell asleep on a pile encircled by Gamzee’s stringy arms and woke up with him still snoozing against the nape of your neck. You had a pap when you needed it, and you had to do was pretend that the hands which massaged your jaw and stretched you out when you were too tired for your own good were not the hands that choked Equius out and pummelled Nepeta’s face concave.  
Obviously, Gamzee didn’t put as much effort into trying to forget that as you did. He remembered the lights in their eyes going out and he revelled in it. He remembered standing off to the side as Nepeta used the last of her strength to drag herself over to her moirail, dead or dying, too far gone to tell, and almost managed to get her hand into his. The bodies you found had fallen just short of holding hands.   
You would fall asleep on a pile and wake up alone. You would turn to him, feeling the heat of a rage or the cloud of grief bubbling up inside you, and realise he was no longer there. He slipped out of your grasp as slowly as the meteor spin through space- ok, no, bad analogy, not double the speed of light, but every second of this insidious road-trip is a fucking eternity, so it still applies on some levels.  
He stopped coming to the piles altogether. He stopped being the kind of person you’d want on a pile.  
But this time, Gamzee is going to stay.  
Maybe not until you wake up. Maybe not even until you fall asleep, but he’s going to stay for some time and you’ll take as much of him as he’s willing to give.  
Mindful of your wound, Gamzee puts an arm around your waist and draws you close to him. The angles of his body press into the smoother curves of yours. His calcium-sticks are not nearly as prominent as you feared they might become without your supervision, but if you were in a nutrition block instead of your respiteblock, the urge to strap him to the table with your belt and feed him the strange orange squash Dave uses as teddy bears these days would be irresistible.  
You tangle a hand in his tight curls and go straight for the base of his horns. His throat rumbles in a purr so suddenly it startles him as well as you.  
“I’m sorry.” he manages around the purr.  
“It’s alright.”  
“No- I…I…”  
You put your lips over his briefly, then move up to his nose and his forehead and his ear, making your way down to his jaw. It surprises you that you still remember your moves- it’s been so long since you had a pap. But you still know he likes getting kissed just under his earlobe (especially if you catch a piece of the earlobe too) while you pap him along the jawline.  
You still know to get as close to him as you can, so there are no gaps between you. You still know to thread one of your arms around his thin neck, and he still knows you like it when he puts a hand a little way up your shirt and traces a tiny circle on your hip or your waist with his thumb.   
Wow, he really needs that nail-file, but you’re not going to break up this pale-fest for a stupid thing like that.  
Gamzee purrs so hard your teeth are vibrating slightly inside your head, but you don’t mind, because you can feel a delicious purr starting in your own throat and you’re going to be humming like a motorboat in a second, so who are you to complain-oh, yep, there you go, thrumming away like there’s no tomorrow.  
After a couple of minutes that feel more like days, making up for the lost time, Gamzee brushes your hand away. He takes over now: papping your jaw and kissing you on the neck, then blowing a raspberry because he knows it’s one of the only ways to get a genuine laugh out of you. He even kisses your wound, very, very gently, more like the feeling of a breeze whispering past your arm than physical contact. Somehow, the pain is numbed after that.  
Maybe he did kill you.  
Maybe this is heaven and the gods have rewarded your stubborn and failed attempt to be a good leader, friend and person over-all with this hallucination of a scintillating pap with the only troll you’ve ever wanted more than you wanted Terezi- and wow, that’s actually a terrible thing to do, thinking about failed quadrants in the middle of a reconciliation pap. If you are still in fact alive, whenever Gamzee does decide to finish you off you’re sure your ass is booked in a seat on the express train to hell.  
When Gamzee starts on your horns, all thoughts of your pain are forgotten. You wriggle into his side, purring and chirping and pushing your face into his collarbone, melted and happy beyond description.  
The catharsis is indescribable.  
“Love you.” you whisper into his hair after a while,  
He mutters something in response that you don’t catch.

You fall asleep too quickly. Pale passions tend to send you off into deep sleeps. Like all of your sleeps, there were little fits of wakefulness between the dreams, no matter how deep under you were. You’re conscious of waking up at least once, with your face nestled in Gamzee’s chest and your legs tangled up in his, your bad arm curled around his waist.  
You don’t dream this time. Gamzee was always good at chasing away your nightmares, but this time it seems he scared off the dream bubbles off entirely. For once, it’s kinda nice not to wander around, to stay in your own head- or it would be, if you were conscious of being utterly unconscious.  
You wake up in a haze.   
It doesn’t take too long to register the distinct lack of Gamzee’s chilly, sharp body against yours. The warm fog of satisfaction from a good night’s sleep and at least a 8+ sweeps rating on the pap that came before it quickly dissolves into a sour, grumpy funk.  
“Of fucking course.”  
You glance around your empty respite-block on the off-chance that Gamzee is in the ablutions block or going through your husktop while you sleep. No such fucking luck. He’s gone.  
Wincing at the pain in your arms, you lie back on your sheets and fight off a wave of nausea. You’re still shirtless, which makes you feel cheap and used. Gamzee came, he saw, he stripped you and cleaned you and papped you into a blissful oblivion, then he left.  
“Brought this on yourself, Vantas.” you say darkly, staring at the ceiling.  
The bastard didn’t even have the pusher to leave a note, did he? Not pinned to your reflection-square, like the two of you really were play-acting pale porn. Not on the pillow along with a rose plucked in the shape of a diamond. Nope.  
He’s left you under-dressed and slightly bloody as usual. You had better get up to see if he has taken care of that stain, or even made a dent in it. Wait, could that be- no, that’s stupid, and you brush away the thought before it can take root in your pan and set you up for even more damage.  
Gamzee isn’t that person anymore. He won’t be ever again, except for tiny exceptions, like the one he slipped into when he spilt your blood for the first time.   
The worst part is the fact that you know you’re going to be waiting for those moments your entire life. Clinging to him, watching him from the background waiting to be rewarded with a flicker of the troll you’re hopelessly in love with, when you’ll swoop in and pretend everything is peaches and cream, that it’s the first night on the meteor again and you’re both so scared you don’t let go of each-others’ hand the whole day until you both fall asleep in the same ‘coon.  
You get up and crack your back, then you notice something you didn’t before.  
Purple letters written across your door and a slight tang of blood in the air- Gamzee’s blood.  
“What the fuck?”  
He must have cut his finger open to write the message. You hope to the gods and Gog that it was only his fingertip. Please let it be only his fingertip. You read and re-read the message at least five times, rub your eyes, and bolt for the ablution block to catch your tears and muffle the sound before you really start howling.  
On the door, Gamzee has left in neat, painstaking Alternian: WON’T TELL :0)


End file.
